How Workato uses LeadIQ to automate outbound prospecting workflows & book more meetings

As SDRs know too well, sales is a numbers game. But it’s not just about quantity; quality matters most. To hit their numbers, reps need to strike the perfect balance between reaching out to enough prospects and ensuring that each interaction is meaningful, personalized, and value-driven to maximize the chances of creating an opportunity.

A few years ago, Workato moved from UserGems to LeadIQ to get the contact data the team needed to accelerate and optimize prospecting workflows. In addition to LeadIQ’s robust contact data, Workato’s SDRs were most impressed by LeadIQ’s contact tracking capabilities, which enabled them to easily identify customers, champions, and power users that changed jobs.

“I think job changes as a signal has historically been very strong for any sales team,” says Michael Fan, director of marketing operations at Workato.

As part of his role, Fan is tasked with automating outbound workflows to support sales and marketing teams.

“Traditionally, my role is seen as a support role that doesn’t have an impact on pipeline and revenue,” Fan explains. “But marketing ops can actually make a huge impact on pipeline revenue.”

Last year, Fan began exploring how he might be able to use LeadIQ and Workato together to help reps work more efficiently. Kicking things off, he decided to see how he could leverage LeadIQ’s Data Hub to automate outbound prospecting workflows while making outreach more personalized — one of Workato’s key priorities.

“For us, being an integrations and automation company, we can actually trigger workflows any time LeadIQ creates a new signal or field or object within Salesforce,” Fan says. “From there, we take a signal— for example, so-and-so just changed jobs. Workato picks up that signal, feeds it to an AI to generate a personalized email, then pushes that over to Outreach and sends the email on behalf of the SDR.”

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Using Workato and LeadIQ together, Fan has helped his SDR colleagues reclaim untold amounts of time; a task that used to take 10 minutes for a single prospect is now entirely automated.

“They just monitor their inbox for replies and that’s pretty much it,” Fan explains. “They don’t even have to write emails anymore!”

As a result of this project, Workato’s improved several key metrics using this outbound automation, including open rates, which increased to 60% to 70% compared to an industry benchmark of 30%to 40%, and reply rates, which increased to 30% to 40% compared to a typical 10% rate in B2B SaaS.

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Fan is also using LeadIQ and Workato together to streamline inbound motions with automatic data enrichment. For example, Workato — which uses a combination of LeadIQ, ZoomInfo, and Apollo as contact data providers — has an email-only form on its website. When someone submits a demo request through that form, Workato picks up the lead that comes in and makes an API call over to the three data providers for automatic enrichment.

“We can create a waterfall enrichment between the three vendors using Workato. Collectively, using the three data providers together, we’re able to automatically enrich 90% of the leads coming in,” Fan continues. “The data we get from LeadIQ is amazing — being able to take action on it and personalize it at scale with the automation we have makes us really successful.”

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In a world without LeadIQ and Workato, an SDR might be able to only reach out to 50 people a day, Fan explains. Using the two tools together is an absolute game-changer.

“Being able to not only take the right data at the right time but then orchestrating the rest of the workflow helps reduce a lot of manual work SDRs need to do,” Fan continues. “This increases the amount of people they can reach out to each day.”

For companies that are not yet plugged into the automation landscape, Fan would recommend LeadIQ for tracking job changes and monitoring other buying signals — all of which makes it easier to book quality meetings. 

But the way Fan sees it, companies with more mature tech stacks that are more serious about automation stand to benefit from LeadIQ the most. 

“With LeadIQ, we can increase the scale of our team while giving time back to SDRs to focus on high-impact tasks — like phone calls, LinkedIn connections, and just being very strategic with the way they’re prioritizing leads,” Fan explains.“ Coupled with automation, you can scale that motion at a much more rapid pace. LeadIQ is a great place to get that source of truth and that data you need to power those automations.”

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